For a full overview, you can view the source code, add feature requests and more on our official github repo: Obsidian Arcana
We are actively looking for new collaborators so please hit me up on Obsidian Forum or Twitter@AFV_7
Arcana
Arcana is a collection of AI powered tools designed to help you be more creative and productive with your Obsidian vault. Each tool is inspired by a famous historical figure:
Socrates - Conversation
Agatha Christie - Text Generation
Richard Feynman - Flashcard Generation
Charles Darwin - Auto Tagging
Nostradamus - Note Naming
Custom Agents
A USP of Arcana is its ability to support user defined custom agents. Consider an agent who is particulary good at teaching you based on preferred learning style and framework. Users can specify templates for conversation agents that they can then chat with.
Future Work
Toolâs Tools - Empowering the AI agents with search and browsing tools that it can make use of to complete its tasks for you.
I agree that itâs not an instant improvement in that using it like a shortcut wonât actually help you learn long-term.
However, this is still an amazing tool that, if used right, can make learning a lot more efficient!
Like, I have to study US Government right now, and there are so many terms to memorize. When a term comes up in my lesson notes, I make a link to a note with the termâs definition so that I wonât forget it later. It would be sooo nice to be able to make the term note and have the definition just generate itself.
Of course, youâd probably want to double check everything because, well, its AI. But when you have, like, 300 terms, this could definitely help you learn more efficiently.
And then flashcard generation! I spend soooo much time making flashcards when I ought to be studying them. This plugin would speed up the process.
And of course, the AI could miss a few things, and Iâd have to fill in the gaps, but stillâthis would speed up my learning.
Thatâs the problem, isnât it? These robots make up answers that look correct but are lies, and then you end up not trusting anything because, well, if you knew at a glance the answers were wrong then you wouldnât need the robot, would you? So either the user doesnât care, or cares and spends a lot of time fact checking. Maybe this is just another Theranos, where some grifters make a lot of money hyping âworld changing technologyâ that isnât.
That is true. Earlier I asked ChatGPT to format some Fountain text into Markdown. It did so incorrectly, so I tried to test if it actually knew what I was asking of it. Turns out, it knows what fountain is, but it does not know fountain. I gave it simple syntax to interpret, and it made up a bunch of stuff! Like, one was pretty creative. It was guessing. A lot of its guessing did turn out correct, but it was still guessing.
So yeah, it sort of does âlieâ in a way. But I wouldnât call it lying because, well, itâs a computer. It isnât smart, and itâs knowledge is limited to what we humans feed it.
But, I think we should look at it like any source. When I come across a new term in my government class, first thing I do is insert the first section of the Wikipedia article on that term into the term note. Now, is Wikipedia 100% reliable? No. But itâs an accessible resource. So, I look at the article and ask myself, does this make sense in the context of the lesson? Often itâs yes. So itâs likely true. And that just saved me a bit of time, and will help me remember the term.
If it doesnât make sense or seems kinda iffy, I look into other resources to find out what the real definition is. ChatGPT is kind of like that. No source is reliable, and you canât really trust anything on the internet. Books can be incorrect. Articles from the worldâs top scientists can be incorrect. That doesnât mean you canât use them, though. Just be aware that they can be incorrect, and look out for cues that they could be incorrect. And, when in doubt, look at other sources.
I still think that this is a great learning resource to take advantage of.
I am of the philosophy of different strokes for different folks. For me, notetaking is about discovering and creating new ideas, and the part of transcribing existing material into oneâs repository might be best outsourced to the machine.
An illuminating example I had the other day was to ask Christie to write âA list of grilling times for different fishes and meatsâ that I stored in a âGrilling Timesâ note. I consider this time saved as opposed to an opportunity lost.
With these tools, I hope that they become less of a hammer to make all else look like nails, and instead are incantations that one can summon selectively and in the best situation.
